The following relates generally to methods and apparatus, for managing secure release of a job request at a multifunction device.
Maintaining confidentiality of electronic transmission, capture, and processing of electronic documents at shared multifunction devices is important as more personal information is recorded electronically and the availability of shared and public multifunctional devices becomes more prevalent. There exist different solutions for managing the secure release of job submissions at multifunction devices, such as printers. For example, some multifunction devices provide a secure print release function that allows a user to associate a password with a print job at the time of job submission from a remote workstation; the printer then holds the print job until the corresponding password is entered at the printer.
Additional solutions for securely releasing print requests exist that are message based or session based (i.e., that are asynchronous or synchronous communication based, respectively). Further, such solutions that are available may make use of public key cryptography and/or infrastructure (PKI). Generally using the PKI infrastructure, any “entity” such as a person, organization, or computational device, may be issued a public/private key pair (where the public key is published, while the private key is kept secret). The PKI infrastructure allows print requests to be transmitted securely over insecure communication channels such as the Internet. A certificate authority (such as VeriSign, Entrust, etc.) may be used to vouch for the binding between a public key and its owner to allow one entity (such as the printer) to trust the other entity (such as the submitter of a print request) signing a certificate.
The following publications and US patents provide examples of existing solutions for enabling secure release of a print job request: “Printing Protocol”, Xerox System Integration Standard, XNSS 118404, April 1984; “Xerox Network Systems Architecture”, General Information Manual, XNSG 068504, April 1985; U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,378,070, 6,688,230, and 6,711,677. However, notwithstanding such solutions, it would be advantageous to provide a system in which the secure release of an encrypted print requests is performed asynchronously from a mobile computing device. It would be further advantageous to provide a method that makes use of existing cryptographic infrastructure to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and release of document job requests submitted to multifunction devices.